homie.

So my friend sent me this website because he knows I have a thing for Asian girls (He also mentioned something about Andi Long, assuming that since I go to UCI I should know her and thus should hook him up). But anyway, here's the website forum thread thing in question:

http://www.superfuture.com/supertalk/showthread.php?t=65493

Okay so it's a bunch of perverted lonely dudes posting pictures of something they call kags-which stands for cute asian girls- and using the usual bits of internet colloquialisms such as "OMG SO HOT," "POST MORE NOW," "SAUCE," "FAPFAPFAPFAPFAP," etc to describe these girls. Then, after the posting of the initial random j-pop starlets and whatever, it starts to gets weird. Skip ahead like 40 pages or something and the pictures of celebrities are replaced, and the users' facebook friends start popping up much more. Along with that, all of them are Asian chicks in dresses too short, drinking too much, and passing out on couches with their pictures taken only to be seen amongst these forum users who get their jollies from jacking off to them.

Well actually, the ones that they like the most tend to be those girls who find joys in partying. The ones that take facebook photos of their clubbing nights and make out with their girlfriends and then pass out. The forum users pass judgment on girls and if they don't fit their expectations, they deem them unworthy of their masturbatory fantasies. And I know that they're only doing this because they've given up on the world and chosen to satisfy themselves digitally. Something or another scorned them from social interactions and they decided to indulge themselves in the digital world.

I couldn't figure out which one made me more sad, the party girls or the forum users who post their pictures on the internet. I mean, I SHOULD feel sadder about the forum users. Rejected by the world, they can only live in fantasy, passing harsh invectives to digital replicas of the girls that pushed them to the brink of their isolation. But I mean, they aren't really isolated. People can make the world change around them, if only they attempt to find the change within themselves. Tired of people? You say no one understands you? Then you need to try to understand them first, and I mean REALLY understand them. Stop looking at people like sheep, or formless reflections of dominant ideologies, the thoughts that pseudo-intellectuals find comfort in. Just start treating people like individuals and you'll notice a marked change in your life.

So I should more sad for the girls then? I mean, they brought the cameras out with them, they got drunk off their asses and posted the pictures on facebook, and thus they should understand the implicit consequences of publishing incriminating evidence of yourself on a media easily accessible by the public. In short, understanding how the internet works. And then I saw this:



She looks like a 15 year old but hey she could be my age for all I know. She looks Filipino but then she could be any dark-skinned Asian, but yo when I see this girl parading herself like that I feel a certain responsiblity to say something.

Homie.
Brown-skinned beauty who I feel
I have a certain cultural connect with.
Or lack of, I don't know.
As the son of immigrant parents
I tried hard to forget I was Filipino,
and instead tried to be Filipino-American.

I would never white out my skin with bleach,
bathe myself in phosphorous to look a little
less brown. But I would turn down my mother's food
because it was too pungent, or acidic
to a tongue too used to hamburgers and pizza.
If someone asked me what my ethnicity was,
I'd say Asian.

Now I know that you're not doing this
to deny the weight of a heritage
you feel is burdened on your shoulders.
As the daughter or granddaughter or descendant
of a culture not rooted within America,
it is the duty of your blood to be aware
of every aspect of your culture.
Wearing it like a mask until
they forget which is your real face.

You're just doing this for fun, I get that.
And I used to do the same thing too until
I realized that it's not just a foreign culture,
not just a different set of practices
implicit in our blood. It's different.
Memories fill our veins as well.

Take a moment to take a breath,
to trace the roots of your family tree
still rooted across oceans in the home land.
Remember a grandfather who didn't pregame,
but drank. He drank to dull the razor edge
of an empty life of working from sunrise
to sunset, for a people who frankly
didn't give a damn.

Or your grandmother who wakes up
every morning at 4 AM, rises before the sun
to tread across 2miles and a river
in order to go to church. Every single day,
a 3 hour trek to and back-that's 6 hours-
a quarter of her day spent devoted
to the reverence of God.

There are still memories living with you.
When you're embraced by your mother, who
when you were little would hold you tight
and tell you that if you work hard your
dreams are possible. Remember too
that she would spend sleepless nights
by a candle studying human anatomy
so she could become a nurse.

Let memories sear into you
a certain kind of dignity
to carry yourself with day to day.
Because it hurts to see you
carry yourself in that that way. Because
as much as we like to joke about
"immigrant guilt," of Asian parents,
the silent cuts of their disappointment
are still the most palpable feeling
along the generation gap,
the cultural divide.